(Swans - February 23, 2009)
To get straight to the point, Richard Seymour's The Liberal Defence
of Murder is a masterpiece of intellectual history and political
agitation that is to the early 21st century what Julien Benda's La
Trahison des Clercs was to the post-WWI period. One supposes that as
long as capitalist war continues to plague humanity, there will be a need
for such a book every generation. Richard Seymour's astonishing
accomplishment is to rise to the occasion on his debut literary
undertaking. Making a seamless transition from the blogosphere to the
printed page, the young man associated with the popular Lenin's Tomb blog proves that an old-fashioned book still has its uses.

In a sense, I am the ideal reader for such a book since I have had many of
the same concerns as Seymour going back to the outbreak of war in Kosovo a
decade ago. Some of the doubts I had about liberal opinion in the first
Balkans war in Bosnia now came to a head as I saw one prominent
intellectual after another cheering for the NATO bombing of the Serb
republic. Many of them had come of age politically during the Vietnam War,
including Michael Ignatieff. Despite having ostensibly learned to dig
beneath their government's justification for war after the Gulf of
Tonkin resolution, many an ex-peacenik was now ready to join the bandwagon
for war in the Balkans. They were now ready to believe that the Serbs had
slaughtered Kosovar civilians in Racak, just as some intellectuals took
LBJ at his word when he blamed the Vietnamese for attacking American
destroyers without provocation.

As it turns out, the Michael Ignatieffs of this world were simply
reverting to form as Richard Seymour ably demonstrates in a tour de force of
intellectual history. As accustomed as I was to this sordid history after
doing some of my own research over the past 10 years, I was not prepared
for the examination of more than 200 years of imperialist apologetics of
the kind we now associate with Ignatieff, Christopher Hitchens, Nick
Cohen, Norm Geras, et al. The most startling revelation for me was how
widespread this tendency was, even among writers I had always considered unblemished.

Take, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville who I knew only as a sharp
commentator on American society in the 19th century who defended French
colonialism's right to impose its will on Algeria on the basis of its
Arab citizens being "half-savage." Tocqueville also dismissed
American Indians and African slaves as being incapable of participating in
a democracy for the same reasons.

Not only did he hold such beliefs, he acted on them politically. As a
member of the French National Assembly, he prepared a report on how to
defeat the resistance to French rule in Algeria so that "our domination
of Africa" could be maintained.

While few would use the same kind of openly racist language in the
modern era, the power relationships between the French and subject
peoples is still unequal as it was back then. Through his penetrating
examination of the career of Bernard Kouchner, the current French foreign minister, Seymour demonstrates that
domination is still the name of the game.

Like Ignatieff, Kouchner was a 1960s leftist but even more extreme. As a
Maoist intellectual, he traveled in the same circles as the men who would
become "New Philosophers" in the 1970s. Along with André Glucksmann
and Bernard-Henri Lévy, Kouchner decided that his pro-Third World leftism
was nothing but a youthful indiscretion.

Kouchner's initial foray into the world of "humanitarian
intervention" was through the auspices of something called Médecins
Sans Frontières, or Doctors without Borders. Starting out initially
on the basis that its doctors should go where they are needed,
particularly in war-torn areas, it soon evolved into a pressure group for
military intervention. Its choice of arenas reflected the geopolitical
needs of its benefactors, as work with Nicaraguan "refugees" in
Honduras during the contra war would demonstrate. While Kouchner's
professionals were shoring up the contra cause, the volunteers I worked
with preferred to operate on the other side of the border as computer
programmers, skilled tradesmen, and engineers. One of them was
Ben Linder, who was gunned down by the same forces with which Kouchner solidarized.

But for all-out propaganda on behalf of the contras, nothing could top
Paul Berman, who used anarchist rhetoric to defend the Reagan-backed
terrorists in the 1980s in the pages of the liberal Village Voice. I
provided information to Seymour in regard to that fumbling apprentice and
was elated that finally somebody was going to cut the pretentious,
warmongering liberal down to size. After reading Seymour's dissection of
Berman, I can only state that my expectations were exceeded.

He begins by recounting the contretemps that led to Michael Moore being
fired from Mother Jones magazine after explaining why he would not publish Berman:

The article was flatly wrong and the worst kind of patronizing bullshit.
You would scarcely know from it that the United States had been at war
with Nicaragua for the last five years.

Not long after Moore was fired, I contacted him to debate Berman in New
York City. To my everlasting regret, the Nicaragua solidarity committee I
was working with at the time decided to go with a Maoist professor who had
little understanding of the process in Nicaragua.

Despite his self-professed affinity for George Orwell, Berman has proven
to be adept in doublespeak, especially when it comes to "War is
Peace." Six years after the Sandinistas were driven from power, Berman
wrote an article for The New Yorker that was filled with lies,
omissions, and mudslinging assaults on the pro-Sandinista left, including
the martyred Ben Linder whose killers were excused on the basis that they
suspected that "Cubans" were in the area. Rather than assassinating
Linder, the contras were supposedly guilty of only shooting him from a distance in panic.

Using testimony from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Richard Seymour makes
the case that an assassination did take place. He reminds his readers that
Berman did not mention the autopsy report of Dr. Michael Baden, New
York's chief medical examiner, who concluded that the bullet that killed
Ben Linder entered his brain from a distance of less than an inch away.

After serving as a propagandist for Reagan's war on Nicaragua, Berman
would serve once again for Clinton's war in the Balkans and for George
W. Bush's Iraq adventure, on which behalf he wrote the execrable
"Terror and Liberalism," described by Seymour thusly:

Paul Berman, as we have seen, considers Baathism a component of the
Muslim branch of totalitarianism, which includes al-Qaeda. In this vein,
Berman provides in Terror and Liberalism the basis for his endorsement of
war against Iraq. Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990,
the situation "had the look of Europe in 1939." Iraq was an expansionist
power, led by a "terrifying" man. He had a "weird hatred" of Israel,
although its border was hundreds of miles away (Berman may not have
learned, as Iraq did in 1981, that Israel has an air force capable of
travelling that distance and dropping munitions).

With elegant turns of phrases such "Israel has an air force capable of
travelling that distance and dropping munitions," we should go on record
as stating that Richard Seymour is a consummate prose stylist on a par
with the young Alexander Cockburn. Perhaps in keeping with an Irish
heritage shared by Cockburn as well as Jonathan Swift, he is in a unique
position to discern brutalities visited on a subject people, while having
the rapier wit and poet's tongue to describe them adequately.

Not only is the prose distinguished by its excellence, Richard Seymour has
a storyteller's knack for describing the descent of many of the
ex-radicals who come under his scrutiny, including Christopher Hitchens,
who emerges as a tragicomic figure. Based on interviews with people who
knew Hitchens in his youth, the picture that emerges is rather Dorian
Grayish. Seymour writes:

When Hitchens endorses the neoconservative Mark Steyn's paranoid
ruminations on the rate at which Muslims are giving birth, he does not
simply engage in an oversimplified and essentialist reading of Islam, or
blame religion for Bush's policies. At this point, he begins to portray
the Muslim population itself as an enemy. So, when young Muslims rioted in
protest against police brutality in France, Hitchens offered the following
verdict: "If you think that the intifada in France is about housing, go
and try covering the story wearing a yarmulke." The stereotype of French
Muslims being particularly anti-Semitic (or even fascistic, according to
some) would be an important factor in converting a number of France's
pro-war intellectuals to full-blown sarkozysme.

While The Liberal Defence of Murder could not possibly be
improved upon, I could not help but think that is perhaps only the
opening salvo in a necessary counter-offensive against the liberal
defenders of murder. While open apologists for imperialist war like
Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman stick out like sore thumbs, there are
also those who are crafty enough to style themselves as
anti-interventionists at the very time they are demonizing those who will
soon be bombed. During the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq, they
were the "pacifists" who argued for "allowing the sanctions to
work." In general, they have more of an orientation to the State
Department or to bodies such as the National Endowment for Democracy than
they do to the Pentagon.

For example, Marc Cooper -- a long-time contributor to The Nation magazine
who brags about his leftist credentials as a translator for Salvador
Allende -- operates as a one-man propaganda squad against the governments
of Venezuela and Cuba. While The Nation decided long ago that his
fulminations against Venezuela and Cuba were not worth publishing, he is
given an outlet at Robert Scheer's Truthdig Web site, and at the LA Weekly
until he was terminated.

For the time being, the main threat to Venezuela is the white wealthy
classes, the right-wing media, and certain sectors of the student movement.
Cooper sees his role as promoting their cause in the U.S. despite the fact
that they constitute the same kind of forces that brought down the Popular
Unity government in Chile with such tragic consequences in the early
1970s. A book could be written about the role of characters such as
Cooper, Ian Williams, and others who repeat the talking points of the US
State Department when it comes to radical movements in Latin America,
especially given their refusal to openly promote military solutions.
Generally speaking there is an affinity between the more open advocates of
military intervention such as Paul Berman and the "soft"
interventionists such as Cooper who are content to do public relations on
behalf of a counter-revolutionary movement that has not yet mustered the
strength to openly confront the people with weapons. Pointing out this
affinity is imperative for the radical movement, especially given the
inevitable confrontation between the Latin American left and the colossus to the North.

Finally, there is a need to do a thorough investigative reporting job on
the think tanks and NGOs that carry out the same sort of subversive
activities as Cooper and Williams within the affected countries and to
expose their funding sources. While Richard Seymour did a fine job
exposing Bernard Kouchner's Doctors without Borders, a full airing out
of the activities of the like-minded Reporters without Borders is
necessary. Using rhetoric about human rights and democracy, this outfit
devotes an inordinate amount of time and energy taking the side of the
right-wing media in Venezuela.

There is also a need to dig beneath the surface of Human Rights Watch (HRW),
whose Latin American bureau prepared a report on Venezuela that was
attacked by over 100 professors and journalists with expertise in the
region as filled with distortions. The purpose of HRW and Reporters
without Borders clearly is to prepare public opinion for armed
intervention down the road if "peaceful" efforts fail at restoring
political power to the rich.

As a dramatic example of the hypocrisy of "peaceful" subversion,
nothing surpasses the NGOs funded by Peter Ackerman, the corporate
raider who amassed a fortune working for Drexel-Burnham in the 1970s, a
now defunct firm associated with an earlier meltdown on Wall Street. Using
his ill-gotten gains, Ackerman is the main support for the Albert Einstein
Institution and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, upon whose board he sits.

Despite the Gandhian pretensions, the International Center on
Nonviolent Conflict devotes itself to meddling in the internal affairs of
countries that endured the so-called "coloured" revolutions in
Ukraine, Serbia, and Georgia. Ackerman has also funded the
"student movement" in Venezuela that is distinguished by its hatred
for the kind of political and social change that has empowered the non-white poor.

Ackerman, following George Soros, an old hand at this, sees nothing
wrong with spending millions to influence the political outcomes in
other countries. When such outcomes lead to unemployment and economic
calamity that produce sickness and death due to privatized health care,
the loss of life is every bit of much a consequence of murder as it is in Iraq or Afghanistan.

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